Commentary and opinion on the illicit trade in cultural objects

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Monthly Archives: February 2016

This month on eBay.co.uk I have been watching Halaf terracotta figurines. And there are a lot of them. Halaf figurines were produced from the seventh through to sixth centuries BC in what is today the territory of Iraq and Syria and immediately adjacent areas of neighbouring countries. They take their name from the archaeological site of Tell Halaf in NE Syria where they were first discovered. They appear on ICOM’s Emergency Red List of Syrian Cultural Objects at Risk.

Between 27 November 2015 and 17 February 2016, seven sellers between them sold 60 figurines for the total sum of £6099. The highest priced figurine sold for £720, the lowest for £12. The average price was £102. Six of the sellers were based in the UK, all in England. One seller, selling only one figurine, was based in the USA. The breakdown for the English sellers was:

Seller 1 sold 29 figurines, with minimal description and no indication of provenance.

Seller 2 sold 11 figurines, with minimal description and no indication of provenance.

Seller 3 sold five figurines, described as ‘Indus Valley’, with a provenance of ‘UK reliable supplier’. The seller also noted that that ‘we support Eastern trade embargo unconditionally’.

Seller 4 sold one figurine, with minimal description and no indication of provenance.

Seller 5 sold six figurines, with minimal description and no indication of provenance.

Seller 6 sold two figurines, with minimal description and no indication of provenance.

Seller 7 sold five figurines, described as ‘British found’ (!).

Questions have been asked about the authenticity of Halaf figurines. Recent seizures in Lebanon have documented how genuine and fake objects from Syria are found mixed together [1] and the appearance of fake figurines on eBay would not be a surprise. As long ago as 2005, the on-line collectors’ community was aware of large numbers of Halaf figurines being sold on eBay, and believed that many if not most of them were fake.

So well before 2011, eBay was awash with material that might have originated in ancient or modern Syria. The figurines being sold on eBay last December and in January and February might have been in circulation for years, or passed out of Syria a few months earlier. Who is to know? That is the gray market we talk about. But it is a very dark gray one. Fake or genuine, at least one law will have been broken on a figurine’s journey to eBay, even if it was only the ‘Eastern trade embargo’. The police seem powerless to act. The sellers are located outside the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police’s specialised art and antiques squad. The low prices of the figurines (and other objects) being sold are probably not enough to warrant serious attention from increasingly stretched provincial police forces. Thus the figurines are being sold openly with knowing or unknowing impunity. There is no need here to postulate sinister hi-tech networks shifting material around the world on the Darknet. The suburban reality is one of open sale on eBay from the garages and attics of middle England.

What else do these eBay sales tell us? Well, for a start, the figurines are selling, and selling well. Customers quite clearly are either unaware of or unconcerned about their origins. Funding Daesh? Who knows or cares? Perhaps buyers honestly believe that the figurines have been out of Syria for decades. Perhaps they do not know that the figurines might originate in Syria or Iraq. After all, none of the sellers advertised the fact. Not one seller mentioned Syria as a possible country of origin. Perhaps buyers are unconcerned simply because the sums of money involved are so small. From what we know of the financial structure of the trade, for a £102 figurine only about £1-2 would end up in the hands of the person making or finding it. But aggregated, these small sums of money add up. Perhaps they are enough to make the trade worthwhile. Alternatively, perhaps these small and inexpensive objects are the residue of larger enterprises, separated off and sold downmarket while larger and more expensive pieces are sold elsewhere.

On 19 February, the English sellers between them had on offer 1257 lots, including many small objects and coins that could have been found in Syria. Also on 19 February, there were 12 Halaf figurines on offer, one from Seller 2, five from Seller 3, three from Seller 1, two from a seller based in Cyprus and one from a seller based in the USA.

What does eBay itself have to say about it all? A long click-distance away from the sale pages, we are directed through the small print heading ‘eBay responsible practices’ to the main eBay.com site where we find the eBay policy on prohibited and restricted items. Here is what it says:

The Halaf figurines are on an ICOM Red List, are widely believed to include forgeries among their number, and the sellers do not include any evidence of provenance or legal sale. And yet eBay does nothing. In January 2016, the UK government announced that it had established a £30 million Cultural Protection Fund for projects aimed at protecting cultural heritage overseas. Let us hope that some of the money is spent on cleaning up the government’s own backyard, starting with eBay.

Another question might involve the relationship between media coverage and the implementation of policy initiatives. To look at that question, I have adopted and extended Christopher’s methodology, collecting a dataset of articles from the first 60 pages of search results on Google News for keywords ‘archaeology looting Syria’ through to the end of 2015. The results are shown on the histogram. I have also indicated by means of red markers the dates of major policy actions. The actions are:

March 2014: UNESCO/EU Emergency Safeguarding of the Syrian Heritage Project.

August 2014: ASOR/US DoS Syria Cultural Heritage Initiative.

February 2015: United Nations Security Council Resolution 2199.

September 2015: ASOR/US DoS Cultural Heritage Initiatives.

It is clear that policy actions have become more frequent as media coverage has increased. To some extent, this must be because media reporting of policy actions increases the overall coverage. But there is also the possibility that policy is responding to media concerns rather than to what is actually happening on the ground. This is worrying because media reporting is known to be unreliable – biased by the commercial and political interests of proprietors, editors and other opinion formers. Fact checking is in short supply and there is a lot of secondhand reporting. Sam Hardy on his blog Conflict Antiquities has also spoken critically of this debilitating ‘churnalism’. If policy is reacting to the unreliable perspective of media reporting instead of to actual facts on the ground, we should not be surprised when it struggles to make any kind of impact. This short study cannot definitively prove that policy is media-driven, but it does suggest the possibility deserves more rigorous consideration.

This Geneva material is only a small part of Symes’s known stock [1]. In February 2001, Symes’s holdings were frozen by order of a civil court, and by January 2002 it was known he stored material at 33 different locations around the world. According to Symes’s own documentation, a total of 17,000 objects was valued at £125 million. Symes was declared bankrupt in 2003 and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in January 2005 for contempt of court. His present whereabouts is unknown. His assets remain frozen.

Medici photograph of male head.

Medici photograph of female head

Between 1979 and 1986, Symes conducted at least 29 transactions with convicted Italian dealer Giacomo Medici. He also sold material through Sotheby’s London. Christos has now discovered images of two heads, one from each of the returned sarcophagi, in the Medici Archive, showing that before reaching Symes they had passed through the hands of Medici. Christos also observes that the heads in the Medici photographs appear to have been broken off from the sarcophagi, meaning that an expert conservator must subsequently have restored them. The identity of this putative conservator is unknown. Christos has also identified a fresco.

The Art Newspaper is reporting that for the auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s ‘Higher-volume, lower-priced business in the middle market could be the saleroom mantra for 2016’ as profits from the high-end market are squeezed. It reminds us that the auction houses are active commercial agents. They are not in business simply to facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers – they are in business to make a profit. With that rather obvious fact in mind, it is illuminating to look back over Sotheby’s New York sales records for non-Islamic antiquities from 1985 to 2013. The following series of graphs shows quite clearly how Sotheby’s has played the market.

This first graph (above) shows how starting in 2001 Sotheby’s began offering fewer lots for sale annually, until about 2009, when the figure averaged out at just under 200 per year. Before then, in the 1980s and 1990s, the number of lots offered for sale annually had fluctuated in the region of 600 to 800. (It is interesting that the number of lots offered annually did not increase appreciably after the cessation of Sotheby’s London antiquities sales in 1997). At the same time, catalogues began including more information about provenance. By 2008, some information was included for nearly every lot offered for auction. That is not to say that the information provided was always useful for tracing back the ownership history and thus legitimacy of the lot offered for sale. Quite often, the ‘provenance’ might consist only of a name or a date. These minimal provenances might be interpreted as an honest attempt by Sotheby’s to meet customer concerns about provenance, or looked upon more cynically as an example of creative compliance, creating the appearance of meeting customer concerns while in reality carrying on business as usual. Either way, they do offer some reassurance to customers mildly worried about provenance, and maybe that is the point. But while such limited information might be of little use for investigating the legitimacy of a lot, it should not be dismissed out of hand. A false provenance is a fraudulent provenance, and fraud is a criminal offence. So any increase in provenance information does increase risk for an auction house, and is a step in the right direction towards a transparent, legitimate market. The nature of this provenance information will be explored further in a future post.

The second graph shows that as the number of lots offered annually has declined, the mean price per lot sold has increased in real terms (all monetary values are standardized to 2005). Perhaps Sotheby’s has been been selling a smaller number of better quality objects. That would make sense. It might also mean though that the objects themselves were increasing in value through time as the market was increasing in value. That would also make sense. These two alternatives will be investigated further in a future post. (The 2007 price ‘spike’ is due to the sale on 7 June of a Late Hellenistic/Early Roman Imperial bronze statue of Artemis and the Stag for $28,600,000 (lot 41) and on 5 December of the Elamite ‘Guennol Lioness’ for $57,161,000. The 2010 price ‘spike’ is due to the sale on 7 December of a Roman Imperial bust of Antinous for $23,826,500).

The third graph is particularly interesting. It examines the relationship between pre-sale price estimates provided by Sotheby’s in its catalogues and actual achieved prices. If the estimates were unbiased, it would be expected that achieved prices would distribute normally around estimate prices. This does seem to have been the case until about 2001, when the number of lots offered annually begins to decline. After 2002, a progressively higher number of lots achieve prices higher than the estimate. It is hard to believe that this is happening by chance, or that Sotheby’s specialists are consistently and accidentally undervaluing material. It seems more likely that estimates are being intentionally kept low to draw in potential buyers. ‘Come-hither’ estimates are an old-established auction practice to drum up custom. Once the potential buyers are bidding of course, they pay little attention to the estimate. But why would Sotheby’s want to attract more buyers?

Traditionally, auction houses made their money from charging a seller’s commission, effectively a service charge levied on a seller. In 1975, in addition to the seller’s commission, both Sotheby’s and Christie’s began charging a buyer’s premium – a service charge levied on a buyer. From 1975 to 1992 the buyer’s premium remained steady at 10%. From 1993, however, Sotheby’s (and Christie’s) began to increase it, and to charge proportionately more for lower-priced lots. By 2013, Sotheby’s was charging 25% on prices up to $50,000, 20% on prices between $50,000 and $1 million, and 12% on prices in excess of $1 million. The fourth graph shows the effect of the increasing buyer’s premium from 1985 to 2013 on two notional lots priced respectively at $10,000 and $500,000. The auction houses have been forced to increase the buyer’s premium because in a competitive marketplace they are vulnerable to potential consignors ‘shopping around’. With auction houses keen to secure business, consignors can negotiate a deal to reduce or even dispense with seller’s commission. Auction house costs then have to be recovered from the buyers, who are less willing or able to negotiate.

Graph number five shows the increasing revenue to Sotheby’s derived from the buyer’s premium. Notice the linear trend line increasing from about $350,000 in 1985 to about $4 million in 2013 (standardized to 2005 values).

Finally, the sixth graph shows that the increasing value through time of lots being sold is real, and not just a function of the increasing buyer’s premium. (All sales data analyzed are from auction house results sheets, which incorporate the buyer’s premium into published prices).

This series of graphs strongly suggests that the changing configuration of auction sales through time is an outcome of a deliberate commercial strategy on Sotheby’s part to increase profitability by (1) reducing the number of lots offered, thereby decreasing associated handling costs; (2) drawing in more buyers with better provenanced lots and come-hither estimates, probably to increase prices by more competitive bidding; and (3) charging buyers progressively higher premiums.

This pattern is indicative of Sotheby’s sales strategy more generally, which since 2002 has been to focus more on the high end of the market [1]. Between 2002 and 2007, across the company, it halved the number of auction transactions and shed staff. Over that period, in a broader reflection of the antiquities sales data discussed here, the mean price per lot sold for all categories of object increased from $35,000 to $50,000. If the Art Newspaper is to be believed, however, we might be about to see this trend put into reverse.

Scholars (such as myself) who would like to use time series auction data as a proxy measure of illicit trade or regulatory impact would do well to take full account of the fact that auction houses are active commercial agents and it might be their commercial agency that is primarily structuring the data.

Reference

Thompson, Don, 2008. The $12 million Stuffed Shark. New York: Palgrave, at 100.

The Trafficking Culture project was established fours years ago today with the support of a European Research Council (ERC) grant. During those four years, it advanced our understanding of the illicit trade in cultural objects, producing foundational research, not just for the academy but for policy makers and other stakeholders. The initial ERC funding expired at the end of January 2016, but the project members are committed to continuing and extending its work.

Trafficking Culture is now an international research consortium. Its researchers (myself, Simon Mackenzie, Donna Yates and Christos Tsirogiannis), based at various institutions in the UK and New Zealand, will be working together on research projects and publications (including an upcoming co-authored book), as well as maintaining the Trafficking Culture website. We will be expanding research foci and developing new projects, all with the continuing goals of understanding the global forces that drive the illicit trade and contributing to the formation of sound, evidence-based, ameliorating policy.